Part 1: Critical Rationalism and General Semantics.
In this post I am going to be discussing some similarities and differences between Critical Rationalism (CR) and General Semantics (GS). Many in the CR camp might find this somewhat peculiar or even downright perverse, those in the GS camp might find this to be a natrual way to elucidate certain elements of GS; there are no GS literature citations in CR literature, but there are a lot of citations that run the other way. Future posts will have a more in-depth analysis of the differences between these two philosophies.
GS and CR overlap in one specific area: epistemology; they both recognise the importance of being open to criticism, and they both believe that knowledge is conjectural. CR is an evolutionary approach to knowledge that has, at its core, a reliance on criticism and imagination, and which argues that science should be based on conjecture and refutation. GS claims to be an all ecompassing system of thought, that takes into account not just philosophical considerations of knowledge, but psychological and physiological considerations1. What we are here most interested in is the fact that GSs approach to knowledge is one that claims that knowledge is never certain because the human body (inc. the mind) itself "abstracts" from the world, these abstractions are sometimes called "maps" and each abstraction, from the concrete world to the various possible mental representations, adds more "noise" to the information. Hence the assumption that "the map is not the territory".
Where they differ fundamentally is in the logic-value they use in their respective systems. CR assumes that a 2-valued logic is sufficient (Popper has some very strong arguments for this), whereas GS claims that we need to have an infinite-valued logic, and that the 2-valued logic (True, false) is just a special case of the infinite valued logic (degrees of probability) where true and false are the extremes of Korzybski's non-Aristotelian system. GS has a further presumption. that we should take this into account in our everyday lives, by being careful about the language we use and also by what korzybski called 'indexing' - a notion borrowed from mathematics - and by avoiding the copula "is" and the use of "allness" claims.
Where they differ fundamentally is in the logic-value they use in their respective systems. CR assumes that a 2-valued logic is sufficient (Popper has some very strong arguments for this), whereas GS claims that we need to have an infinite-valued logic, and that the 2-valued logic (True, false) is just a special case of the infinite valued logic (degrees of probability) where true and false are the extremes of Korzybski's non-Aristotelian system. GS has a further presumption. that we should take this into account in our everyday lives, by being careful about the language we use and also by what korzybski called 'indexing' - a notion borrowed from mathematics - and by avoiding the copula "is" and the use of "allness" claims.
Future posts will investigate the relationship of these two theories through the many themes that have already been touched upon in this post. The next post will deal with "allness" claims.
Until next time...
1. This originally had the eluciditaion ", in short a theory that would now be called a theory of embodiment - a theory of how the structure of our bodies influences how we understand the world" Kenyon kindly offered a clarification that embodiment is more to do with cognitive science, which general semantics predates and does not have much in common with.
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